The Journey Underground
by Harzlek
Summary: This is a story I wrote for my creative writing class. I have neither read the book nor seen the movie, I am just going off how I would imagine things to be.


Underground

by ~Harzlek

This book contains scattered descriptions of plants and animals that have never been seen before. Each description is accompanied by a very detailed drawing. Halfway into the journal, the writing medium switches from ink to pencil, and them to charcoal.

July 4th, 1956, 2:30 P.M. pacific central time

This is my first journal. I am not very skilled in this art, but I feel that I need to keep an accurate account of this. I guess I should begin by telling how I got to this mine shaft. About 3 weeks ago a colleague of mine, Jorgen Scheisskopf, proposed an idea to me. "Imagine, Samuel, a world beneath our feet. An entire ecosystem inside a bubble of air suspended in an ocean of magma." Of course, I thought he was crazy, I still do; on account of the fact that we are still wandering through some old mine shafts. But, he contracted me to do a job, so I hired 20 experienced Spelunkers to join in the expedition. I will know more soon.

July 4th, 1956, 7:56 P.M. pacific central time

We have stumbled, I mean literally, on a 200 foot tall cliff. Currently, the men are preparing to rappel down to the bottom. I am rather nervous; I have never done this in a cave.

July 4th, 1956, 9:34 P.M. pacific central time

We made it to the floor with little incident. One man, I think his name is Gregory, slipped and fell 10 feet. He has a nasty bruise on the back of his head, but he will be fine. My mate Raymond says that we will continue deeper into the cave in the morning. God! I do not see how you can tell it is morning down here. The clock! Yes the beloved clock.

July 5th, 1956, 6:23 A.M. pacific central time

Why do I put such an exact time for a heading? I suppose it calms my nerves. We started moving at 5:30, kind of early, but who cares? We are still hiking down a gentle slope carved into this wide cave by millions of years of water erosion and seismic activity. I have been noticing a lot of schist. Jorgen's case is getting stronger. If not for the ecosystem bit, it would be possible.

July 5th, 1956, 7:45 P.M. pacific central time

Wow! One of the men has broken through the wall of the cave, exposing an old volcanic shaft. The walls are lined with gems, many diamonds and emeralds just loosely embedded into the wall. It seems that all the men are packed it the shaft stuffing their packs. I seem to have found myself in the midst. Ah! The greed of humans!

July 5th, 1956, 7: 56 P.M. pacific central time

As I write this, I realize that I am falling in mid-air. A complete free-fall. Shortly after finishing my last journal entry, the crystalline floor gave way and allowed most of the group and me to fall. At first, it was terrifying. Lots of yelling and screaming, but eventually you get tired of screaming, it gets boring. I actually rather like it, the wind whipping at my hair and all. Hold, water is coming, need to protect my journal. Write soon if I live.

July 6th, 1956, 10:34 A.M. pacific central time

After my last journal entry we gradually came upon a giant water fall in the deep shaft. We fell for a half hour before the shaft began to gradually slope and slowed us down. I am amazed that we survived that fall; that we were not impaled by stalagmites formed by the rushing water. We slid at a quick rate out of the shaft, to fall through the air a short distance into a pool. The room was amazing; it was lit by a strange, glowing fungus growing out of the ceiling, perhaps feeding off gasses and lime deposits. Several of the men had too much weight on their packs and were pulled under the water and sent through an underground river. Over the shortwave radios a few of the men were carrying, we received faint transmissions from the lost people. Apparently, they resurfaced, once they abandoned their packs, in another room. They told us that they could see a bright light from a bend in the tunnel. We decided that we need to get out of this room and find a way to survive, possibly escape to the surface. I will update this journal when I have learned more of our situation.

July 12th, 1956, 4:30 P.M. pacific central time

This place is astonishing. When we made our way into the next chamber and out of the tunnel, everyone, especially me, was struck speechless. Glowing on the ceiling is a giant cloud of ignited gas. It is acting as a star, providing light to all the plants and animals, I guess you could say that they are thriving! We were at the edge of a wide river, walking among dense foliage made up of thick, broad-leafed ferns that rise up to our waists. I noticed a multitude of small creatures scurrying among the ferns; not quite scared of us, more like curious. I am currently residing inside of a hollowed out, giant mushroom that is one of a huge forest of giant mushrooms. When we first wandered into the forest, I stumbled over the skull of a giant velociraptor. It was mildly fresh. Its body was stripped of all muscle and skin. A man in the group that I befriended named Anderson knocked out a few teeth and stripped some of the partially decayed sinew. With that, he made a necklace with some huge, vibrantly colored flight feathers found scattered about. He gave it to me as trophy for finding the extinct creature.

Our supplies are running low, so we are soon going to try to forage for some food, I hope we find some.

July 13th, 1956 9:14 A.M. Pacific central time

Harold, our expedition guide, was swarmed by the little green, feathery creatures. He is fine, except for a few prick which I assume are bites. The brashness of these creatures is to be expected. As far as I can tell, these animals have not had any human contact. That would most definitely explain their behavior, testing us to see if we are a threat...or a meal. The men are complaining of gas pains. I would assume it is from our diet of native plants; we have not attempted to eat any of the native creatures.

July 30th, 1956, 12:00 P.M. Pacific central time

There seems to be an outbreak of a severe version of typhoid fever. One man has the symptoms of the pox, but the pustules are not like anything I have ever seen...and I was at one point in time a general practitioner in Nigeria, treating many diseases. I fear for what will become of us if we cannot find a way to fight these diseases.

August 6th, 1956, 5:30 P.M. Pacific central time

It has been seven days since I've thought about this journal. I've been distracted by the building tension among the men. Ever since those four of the fifteen died from sickness, people have been acting paranoid, saying they hear voices at night and that the thicker air caused the deaths. Whenever I tell them that all that stuff is to be expected, they just yell at me and call me a heartless scientist. The truth is quite the opposite; I felt those deaths just as keenly as the others. Perhaps more, since it foreshadows further loss in this entirely alien environment.

August 8th, 1956, 10:56 A.M. Pacific Central Time

A hunting party returned today, lead by Gregory. He was dragging some sort of gray creature in a handmade net. At first, I was not sure what it was. It turned out to be a small, intelligent being. I believe it communicates using telepathy, but it looks nothing like a human and it is only three feet tall. That is large for most animals. Oh, the animals! There are so many! So much variety. They are all very strange, nothing like animals on the surface. I believe that over millions of years, plants and animals somehow found their way down here and evolved to suit this smaller habitat. Speaking of evolution, fungi are among the oldest variety of organism on this planet. It seems to flourish because there is no true sun down here, just a cloud of ignited gas that dies down part of the day and lights back up the rest. So, if I am correct in my theory, this creature Gregory dragged into the camp for me to observe is some sort of intelligent fungus. I am about to examine it, but it looks very frightened. Let's see what it is afraid of.

August 8th, 1956, 4:00 P.M. Pacific Central Time

From what I can discern at a distance, this creature is very odd. I was correct in my assumption that it is, in fact, a fungal-based organism. I observed it consuming dead and rotting garbage strewn about the camp.

I dare not approach, for it has some sort of defense mechanism where a pustuale bursts and a cloud of spores is inhaled by anybody that nears it. One of the more assertive gaurds was sprayed by said spores while trying to get a better look at this strange creature and had some sort of allergic reaction. It is not looking pleasant.

August 10th, 1956, 9:30 A.M. Pacific Central Time

That was amazing! I was having vivid dreams about this place. I saw a great water fall filling up a basin. Then, super-heated water exploded up as a geyser. I woke with a start. It felt like something was watching me. And sure enough, the little fungus creature was standing beside my cot. At first, I was scared stiff. But, I had a strange feeling of peace from it. I can't really say, but it had a friendly expression on its "face", even though its head was a simple lumpy mushroom cap.

When I asked what it wanted, it pointed toward the river and I had a series of mental images showing us floating down the river in a giant, dried-out mushroom cap. Another of us floatin in he geyser shaft I saw in my dream.

It wanted us to leave.

August 15th, 1956, Noon Pacific Central Time

(These next pages are smudged with blood.)

I don't...why is fate so cruel? We understand so little about this environment. I suggest we leave this blasted place to its own damned fate! Those people did nothing to provoke such terrible demise.

Oh... I m rambling. After some convincing, I led the to the waterfall. It was even more majestic in reality! I cannot tell how deep it descends, but I could see that it would be a manageable climb.

This is where things go downhill. I was assisting in the search for a suitable mushroom cap. But, since everyone so excited at the prospect of going home, we used little prudence during the search. We were loudly stomping about, swapping rude stories from when we were on the surface. we paid little attention to potential dangers... at the cost of half the expedition. Massive plants similar to Venus fly traps reached down and grabbed half the troop. The long, curved thorns pierced their chests, so that even if we cut them down, the would have been dead anyway.

Six dead. All we can do now is continue on and hope we make it.

August 20th, 1956, 7:45 P.M. Pacific Central Time

We found a stand of unique puffballs, which I dubbed Cavtia Immensus Subterraneus. Seeing them made me think fond memories of throwing them at my brothers and watching the spores puff out. Imagine those, but multiply that size by a hundred and you can begin to imagine these sizes. They are all in a cave, hanging from the ceiling. The floor is strewn with spore dust, since they recently released their spores. They are perfect! The outside skin is very hard and leathery. We tried burning it, but the most that would happen s a little bit of burning on the edges of the piece. And no matter how much we boiled some, it never got soft. The exterior thickness is about that of my fist, pinkie to index finger. We could stitch the ripped hole on the bottom in order to seal it. We eventually found one that was about eight feet wide. Just enough for us to fit inside.

August 23rd, 1956, 5:20 P.M. Pacific Central Time

These past few days of preparation for our imminent ascent on a geyser that occurs every hundred years, I have looked over all my past entries and realized that I have only been explaining what has happened. I have not expressed what a journal is meant to allow you to express. I am lonely, I am sad, I miss my home, and I, saying this without anger, realize that we will probably not survive this journey.

I suppose I should be fortunate that I have no significant family. Of course, most of the men who have died all because of my hair-brained idea of descending into the bowels of the earth just to look at some rocks and test a theory, probably had a loving wife and smiling children. I just feel that I may not be able to handle telling their families that it was all my fault, that I caused them to die by offering them money their families needed to escort me to their mutual doom.

I acknowledge that whoever may read this would most likely be thinking, "Sam, it was not your fault, you did not cause those problems, it was just a roll of the dice!" I would prefer not to have laid the lives of people I barely know on the random face of a few die. I have based my life on hard certainty; weighing every option thoughtfully and carefully. Making sure that the choice I made was the correct one. Jorgen was the catalyst that caused me to fundamentally alter that key factor that made me, me. I went to calculation Sam, to roll with the blows and see where that leads us, Sam. I despise myself for that. I was the sole cause of their demise, and I have to live with that.

No matter what happens, this is my last entry into this damned journal. The journal that allowed me to suppress these provocative emotions with hard facts that do little to sate the fundamental human need to feel. The need to feel...something.

October 2nd, 1956

This is Donald Krup. Sam was forsed to stay. His leg fell into a crak in the grownd that was coverd up in some sort of slime crap. I dont no. It was weird. I saw the hole but the slime somhow groo in a couple seconds. Well, he broke his nee. It was not no bad brake but he cood not hav made the trip fast enuff. He sed to leeve him. He said somthing strange. He sed somthing abowt that shroom monster wanting him to stay. I dont no. It sownded prety strang at the time. He sed that he felt at home there. That thoz monsters wanted him to stay and he wanted to also. Well we left him. That maid me sad. I likd him. He was to hard on himself. but he def sure did rite sum cool things in this jernal. I wish I was that smart. He taught me how to rite a little while we was down ther. Like I sed. He was too hard on hisself. He did sum good. I wood say those that dide forgiv him. I sur do.


End file.
